When a female friend recently asked why I preferred Barack Obama, my wife responded, "He just doesn’t like Hillary Clinton!"—relegating me to the cadre of male chauvinist Hillary antagonists. After 50 years of marriage, four daughters, and a United Nations Award for my cartoons supporting the equal rights amendment, she knows better than that—tho our friends may not.
However, gender (and racial)bias is cruising the campaign landscape. A good example is Hardball’s talking head, Chris Mathews who has left a wake of sexist, misogynist comments along his coverage of the campaign trail. (See Media Matters and Daily Kos)
My problem with Hillary Clinton as a candidate for President is that her political genesis is firmly rooted in "beltway" establishment mentality, when this nation desperately needs leadership that does not fear thinking out of the box and speaking frankly.
On the war on Iraq, she first explained her vote----embracing the "Saddam Hussein is a threat" theory of the neo-cons. When the majority of the country finally caught on to the Bush debacle, she embraced the "if I had known then, what I know now" beltway speak. At no time did she look the country in the eye to say she was wrong and that she regretted it. As recently as the Nevada debate, she parsed her explanation by blaming pentagon deception and by accepting Bush’s word that he had no intention of going to war. This at time when most of the Western world knew he was a serial liar!
Robert Johnson, a billionaire supporter of Clintons and founder of Black Entertainment Television -- made a snide allusion to Obama using drugs and compared him to Sydney Poitier in "Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner" during a speech in South Carolina. Johnson then denied the drug allusion.
Tim Russert , read a quote from Hillary Clinton in which she said she would not tolerate inappropriate behavior on the part of her supporters and would get rid of them. Then Russert asked if she planned to distance herself from Mr. Johnson. In a "beltway speak" moment she said that Johnson had explained his remark and she accepted it. Presumably, she "accepted" his denial that he said what everyone heard him say!
After six years of a lying, deceitful administration that has taken us into a unjustified war, that has denounced the Geneva Convention and embraced techniques of torture, that has done serious damage to our constitution and squandered the first budget surplus this nation has had in decades----we need someone who is NOT inherently inclined to triangulation, calculation and equivocation---no matter what their gender or race.
Bill Sanders
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